Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 18:07:07 -0400

From: Beverly Flanigan FLANIGAN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]OUVAXA.CATS.OHIOU.EDU

Subject: come with and mergers



As others have noted, "come with" is similar to the separable prefix

(or verb+particle) constructions common in German, Norwegian, etc.; I

heard it regularly growing up in Minnesota and still use it (much to

the consternation of my non-Minnesotan son). This must be kept

distinct from the "drop off" construction, however. The latter deletes

a direct object, whether pre- or post-particle (in the child examples

cited, that is, not in the intransitive usage in, e.g., "He dropped off

the face of the earth"). If the verb+particle form is derived from an

object-focused construction (as my syntactician colleague claims it

does), it is from the prep.+object one ("come with me"), not the

verb+D.O. construction.



And this syntactic form has nothing to do, of course, with the uhr/ohr

and ihr/ehr (near) mergers, which I never heard in Minnesota. Both are

common in Baltimore and, I believe, Philadelphia--and D.C., Peter?



Beverly Flanigan

Ohio University